WASHINGTON — "'Balance' is a code word for taxes," Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana, was saying. "We're headed for catastrophe because this mandatory spending is out of control. You have to take this on. Save the program and then save the country." Then there was a low whistle and everything went gray and I woke up in 1981.

It is flatly bizarre to watch Congress at work one day before we all pass through the dark gates into Sequestration Mordor. In the Senate, the Republicans affect the persona of embattled truth-tellers at the mercy of a unyielding majority. In the House, the Democrats affect the persona of the embattled staff of a more opulent than usual environment. Everyone is pretending that they never saw this coming, that nobody could have imagined that things would come to this terrible pass. They all deplore the results of sequestration, but they all also continue to pretend that it was a good idea to start with, and that is their capital mistake.

Whatever happens tomorrow, the utter failure of sequestration to do what it is designed to do is of a piece with the previous failures of the Gang Of Six, the Gang Of 12, and the king of all revered utter failures, Simpson-Bowles, which still has most of official Washington feeding Vaal at every turn in service to a commission that couldn't even muster a majority of its own membership, Whatever happens tomorrow, the utter failure of sequestration to do what it was supposed to do — namely, to be so utterly horrifying that it would force a deal — should bring an end to government by gimmick.

Government by gimmick is a dodge. Government by gimmick is a way for politicians to protect their status as politicians without actually doing the jobs they were elected to do. Government by gimmick depends vitally on the fundamental Beltway anti-democratic heresy — that the system as designed is inadequate to present circumstances and that the only way out of this is to go put together the proper group of bipartisan Very Important People to apply common sense to the problem. It was government by gimmick — the Tower Commission — that probably bought Ronald Reagan out of the Iran-Contra scandal because the gathering of wise men determined from the start that holding the president responsible by constitutional means would scare the children and disturb the horses. This is the principle that was applied to the useless Gang Of 14 solution to the "problem" of judicial filibusters. And, ever since the American people elected a Congress full of right-wing chew toys in 2010, government-by-gimmick has been the way the American economy has been directed, and now all the duct tape is failing, and the balsa's cracking, and the whole thing is coming apart, and the people in charge are spending long hours talking about how they couldn't have foreseen any of this.

I am not a Constitutional fetishist. (Electoral College? Outta there!). However, I do respect the fact that the whole system was set up on a system of controlled conflict. The problem, of course, is that the controlled conflict depends on the fact that, once elected, politicians will respect a certain set of unwritten rules that grease the gears of the system itself. Some of these rules are not admirable ones. But, ever since Newt Gingrich established the precedent for Republican congressional vandalism, it has been a regular bit of business for conservative lawmakers to blow up informal custom as well as the formal legislative process. (The most vivid example, of course, has been the conversion of the once-perfunctory vote on the debt ceiling into a means of political blackmail.) The system grinds to a halt. Fingers are pointed. The Republicans stand firm. The Democrats propose another "bipartisan" gimmick that has not political constituency beyond Constitution Avenue. It proposes a "solution" that is either abandoned, like Simpson Bowles, or ignored in practice. (How'd that Gang Of 14 deal on the filibuster work out?) The solutions produced by the gimmicks demand no political loyalty nor any political respect, proceeding as they do from impromptu institutions created due to the failure of the permanent ones.

Of course, sequestration failed. It never had a chance to succeed. It never should have succeeded. It never had a serious purpose. It was a goad, and not a particularly terrifying one. It was created to provide a stage for posturing. It was always was an angry puppet show, and the angry puppets are now at center stage. If it does nothing else but kill off government-by-gimmick, or eliminate "bipartisanship" as a goal in and of itself, it may turn out to have done some good.